Inspector Gadget  (V1)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
Release Year: 1987
Developer: Sconosciuto
Publisher: Sconosciuto
_________________________

(From GTW64) :

"It almost brings a tear to my eye when thinking back to watching this great cartoon series as a young kid. So much so that when I found the game in a second-hand shop, I was quick to buy it.

Loading up the game when I got home, I was sadly disapointed to find a poor arcade adventure game based around a murder at a circus.

When researching for GTW and generally playing various games, I came across this interesting preview of the game, which is nothing like the abysmal game that was released.

This version of the game is much closer to the style of Melbourne House games which was typical at the time (Muncher, Street Hassle), with a chunky main character (Though accurate and bloody well animated!).

Gadget has to run through a horizontally scrolling level (Very much best described as a Metro Cross clone), jumping obstacles and getting Gadget skates and other gadgets like the Helecopter, spring legs and other bits. Very faithful to the cartoon original, and much more fun!.... 

Collecting certain objects, makes you jump to other screens, which I can't quite make out. This can be put down to the fact that its an early preview, and one that crashes fairly frequently, but its damn playable!

No music exists in the preview, apart from an awesome rendition of the theme tune in the intro sequence, far better than Jason Brooke's version in the released game, and much closer to the the cartoon and the style of old Melbourne house music. You can check it out for yourselves from the link above (Make sure you have a good sidplayer). 

Graphically very funny, and the animations for each part of Inspector Gadget are very faithfully reproduced.

Recently it has been discovered that the version in Gamebase 64 has the missing intro sequence, which is a very faithful rendition of the cartoon's intro... superb!.... Plus it has the music which has been sitting in HVSC for a while. This updated version has been added in the download recently. 

Well, the scanned advert (thanks to Peter Weighill for supplying a link) proves that this WAS to be Circus Of Fear..... So it seems that there must have been some kind of problem with the game, or disagreement over pay maybe?.... We are not too sure yet. 

 Thanks to Mat yet again, the creators were recently found and now we find out exactly what happened to this game. Check out the Creator Speaks pages for more details.

 Essentially, the game was being developed by Ian Chia, and was almost getting to a complete stage. But towards the end there was a bug that kept crashing the game, and unfortunately after many banging of heads, the developers could not find what was 
 causing it. With deadlines looming, Melbourne House had to concede defeat, and so new developers were very quickly drafted in to knock out a quick effort which was the dire arcade adventure game which was released... Dire maybe because it was rushed. 

 What is quite sickening though is the fact that soon after the contract was passed over to another development team, the developers of the original game found that it was something startlingly simple that was causing the crash, and that they could have after all fixed it and finished the game. Sadly bad luck prevented what should/could have been an excellent licensed game.

 It is not known exactly how the game has managed to sneak out, but it is believed that this is the final version, and indeed it does crash on occasion. Both developers did not know how the game was sneaked out, and were quite surprised to see it after so many 
 years. Ian was only around 1617 when he was developing the game.

 The main thing to be taken out of this, is that the preview has sneaked out. It is possible more graphics, level maps and enemies are hidden in the code and haven't been implemented just yet. Possibly this is something that can be explored in the future. 

 It is a game that could be finished maybe. But one thing is that we can close the case on this game at long last, and we now know that this was never more complete than what we have here. Enjoy it, and dream of what could have been..

Wonderful representation of Gadget on our C64..."


http://www.gtw64.co.uk/Pages/i/Review_Inspectorgadget
